Aurora

It’s been almost a week since the horrifying mass shooting in Aurora, Colorado that left 12 innocent moviegoers dead and dozens more wounded. It’s been almost a week since we saw the photos of the man who did it, the man who by all accounts is educated and, prior to this psychotic break, just another child of upscale white suburbs.

When will it end? How many more of these heinous crimes against peaceable assembly must we endure before we finally address their root causes: poor treatment of mental illness and ease of access to firearms of mass destruction. I grew up in New York City in the 1980s, so I will never understand why anyone needs to own a gun. All it took was watching the scene in Ghost where Patrick Swayze was shot and killed for me to hate guns forever and to constantly worry about whether my parents would come home safely from eating out with friends.

Since I accept that we will never see a constitutional amendment banning guns outright in this irreparably polarized country, I am hoping that we can instead undertake efforts to curtail gun violence through regulation – and one fine place to start is by getting large-capacity magazines off the market for good.

I can’t tell you how sad I was when I read that gun purchases spiked in Colorado in the wake of this senseless act. What kind of sense does that make? A bunch of people get shot in an enclosed area, and you think you need more guns? If everyone in the theatre had been armed, I guarantee you that easily twice as many people would have died.